Like many of the other tech companies – Lyft, Zaarly, Fiverr – that have gotten bucketloads of venture capital to match underemployed people with no-commitment gigs, TaskRabbit taps into an existing need – any kind of income in an economy increasingly built on low-wage jobs or no jobs at all – and fulfils a real desire for flexibility among 21st-century workers. The company's CEO has said that TaskRabbit's goal is to "revolutionize the world's labor force".

But TaskRabbit, like all the others, is just a site and an app that matches workers – "taskers", in the company's terminology – with one-off jobs that other people want done for them. In the old days – as in, a couple of weeks ago – workers would bid on jobs posted by potential clients on the TaskRabbit site, and clients would select the best bid for "outsourcing" chores like cleaning the oven, wrapping gifts or assembling Ikea furniture. The pay might have been low at that point, but workers determined it for themselves, just as they determined when and what kind of work they would do.

Now, TaskRabbit has changed its rules. Attempting to capitalize on the explosion in the so-called "gig economy" and set itself apart from the ever-growing competition, TaskRabbit this month has begun using a new algorithm to match workers with clients, who then contact a given worker to see if she is available, and the worker has 30 minutes to accept or reject the bid.

The taskers are not pleased.

"One of the big draws to TaskRabbit in the first place was flexibility – now, I lose out on work not because somebody underbids me but because I decided to have a life that day or get work done," Sally Mercedes, who used to regularly use the site, wrote me in an email on Tuesday. She went on:

I keep being matched up with people paying significantly less than the hourly rate I listed on my profile for that task. That probably annoyed me more than anything else.

Jamie Viggiano from TaskRabbit tells me the new experience was designed based on eight months of feedback from both clients and taskers. "We built a solution for the majority," she says. "On average, our taskers are getting 400% more working opportunities than they got in the old experience." Taskers can, if they're not getting enough tasks at the rate they've set, use a "rescue tasks" app in order to find work that may be below their normal rate.

But it's notable that the updated site looks a lot like, well, any other employer these days. The company now touts its "skilled professionals" who undergo criminal background checks and in-person interviews. And, if that's not enough, you can ask specifically for the TaskRabbit "elite", a top-tier workforce that is both highly active and highly rated by clients.

TaskRabbit, Zaarly, Agent Anything and the other supposedly high-tech companies bill themselves as new and improved takes on the modern working world, but their model actually comes from a much older concept: piecework. It was common in the late 19th and early 20th century that, instead of working in a factory for a wage or a salary, workers sewed or assembled goods at home and were paid by the finished item rather than for their time. The new wave of piecework may look different – working for an individual rather than a big company, working for many different clients instead of just one, and having a website act as a broker (and take 20% off the top) – but it has very similar roots.

This "revolutionary" work built out of Silicon Valley convenience is not really about technological innovation – it's just the next step in a decades-old trend of fragmenting jobs, isolating workers and driving down wages.

And, as Paul Mason noted the other day on these pages, there's a whiff of the "shape-up" in these gigs – that is, when workers lined up on the docks to be chosen for a day's work ... or not. They pit tasker against tasker for the prize of some work, giving already-atomized workers an added incentive not to share information about employers, wages and fees. As Mercedes told me:

I have ended up on tasks where I learned I was making significantly more than the others, which is always interesting to discover.

But while technology has made it easier for clients to find workers to do low-paying gigs, it has also made it easier for workers to find each other. And despite the competitiveness engendered by the TaskRabbit system, there are multiple groups on Facebook where TaskRabbit workers and users of other "gig economy" apps talk to one another – including at least one that formed specifically in response to the latest changes, and multiple location-based groups.

It might be a big step from a Facebook group to a union, but getting together to express grievances is a first step toward organizing. Worker's organizations are going to – and going to have to – look different in this century from the unions we're accustomed to. They will need to be as flexible, streamlined and quick as the tech companies they target – but the basics won't change. And, as the longtime labor movement saying goes, the boss is often the best organizer: TaskRabbit's changes may have finally given gig-workers something to get together about.